Gwenview has been KDE’s flagship image viewer for over 25 years. It works, it’s feature-packed, and it’s been modernized repeatedly. Gwenview has served generations of KDE users faithfully and well.So… why build a replacement?Well, over the years Gwenview has fallen behind in some areas that can’t easily be retrofitted without rewriting half of it anyway — like better performance with large image libraries, GPU acceleration, mobile-friendliness, and the kind of enjoyably hackable QtQuick UI that would make it easier to modernize and engage a new generation of contributors.Either by way of illustration or as a result of the above, community contributions of features, bug fixes, and UI improvements to Gwenview have dried up in recent years. It would appear that Gwenview’s technical architecture has reached the limit of what people are willing to do with it.Something newMeet Photos (originally named “Koko”):Actually I lied: Photos is not a new app. Its first release was five years ago, after extended development dating at least back to 2017. But it was always somewhat niche, because it began as a mobile app and couldn’t match Gwenview in raw functionality and desktop-friendliness.So over the past year, Techpaladin Software (full disclosure: I’m the CEO) has sponsored a bunch of development with the explicit goal of bringing Photos to parity with Gwenview as a first-class desktop app. Oliver’s recent blog post contains lots of interesting details about the process.Techpaladin folks will continue to contribute maintenance for a while, but our hope is that we’ve managed to bootstrap the app to the point where the KDE community can generally take over for further feature and UI development on the desktop side. Therefore…Give it a try!I’d like to invite users to try using Photos, and invite distros to consider replacing Gwenview with it — either soon, or in the future.I’m sure it won’t be perfect. Gwenview has had an extra 15 or so years in the metaphorical oven. But at this point Photos has pretty much all of the relevant features, plus some added goodies:Much better performance, especially with large photo libraries and high DPI screensMobile-friendly UI that’s also capable of being used as a very small windowShares Spectacle’s amazing annotation systemYou can mark images as favoritesTimeline, location, and “just show me all my images” viewsSo give it a try! The current 26.08 release is pretty good, and the upcoming 26.12 release will add a few more improvements.If you find any bugs, sources of UI awkwardness, or missing features compared to Gwenview that you actually need and care about, feel free to report them on the Bugzilla page. And changes can be contributed via merge request on Photos’ invent.kde.org page.Let us know what you think! And if you like it, consider helping out with development or bug triaging. It takes a village to raise a child maintain an app.